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> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks

> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this. DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated. It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive. It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time. Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :) I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable. Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files. This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable. My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs. (That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)

adestefan 14y ago
I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.
- AgentConundrum 14y ago
  The books, while the impetus for this particular comment, are only part of the puzzle. Music is pretty much entirely digital at this point in one form or another - how many people do you know carrying a discman? Movies are starting to trend harder that way too, as well as books. Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting. My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    So until music and movies are sorted out, you will not buy eBooks?
icebraining 14y ago
My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not. In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
- AgentConundrum 14y ago
  I did mention in the previous paragraph that I was referring to an unrealisticly strict view, and that most people won't think in those sorts of concrete terms. My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products. I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways. As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent. I hope that made some sense.

adestefan 14y ago

I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.

AgentConundrum 14y ago
The books, while the impetus for this particular comment, are only part of the puzzle. Music is pretty much entirely digital at this point in one form or another - how many people do you know carrying a discman? Movies are starting to trend harder that way too, as well as books. Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting. My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  So until music and movies are sorted out, you will not buy eBooks?

icebraining 14y ago

My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not. In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/

AgentConundrum 14y ago
I did mention in the previous paragraph that I was referring to an unrealisticly strict view, and that most people won't think in those sorts of concrete terms. My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products. I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways. As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent. I hope that made some sense.